Author Archive
Summer of Soul
Movie Corner (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) Documentary/Music (2021 Searchlight Pictures) ★★★★★ By HOWARD MCQUITTER II Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969 is the festival all but forgotten, deliberately thrown (literally) down in a basement. Many people in Harlem at the time believed the festival is the main reason racial disturbances that year didn't occur like the previous year after the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4,1968. All in all, over 300,000 Harlem residents, 99% African American, crowded into Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) - all outdoors - to see and hear a great tribute to African American music: gospel, jazz, blues, rhythm & blues, and soul. The few cops at the festival are barely visible. Nearly all the security is provided by the Black Panthers for an energetic, peaceful, and historical [...]
Three Lives Lost Over $20
Tales from Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery 189th in a series By SUE HUNTER WEIR The St. Paul Globe characterized it as a story that began and ended in a graveyard. It was the murder of Thomas Tollefson, a streetcar conductor, on the night of July 26, 1887. Tollefson's murder was, as many crimes are, senseless and poorly planned. When all was said and done, three men died--one man murdered and two men hanged for having killed him. The two murderers netted a total of $20 (worth a little more than $430 in today's currency). 1880-1886. Horse-drawn streetcar, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Tollefson was a 28-year-old Norwegian immigrant who earned his living driving the Cedar Avenue streetcar line. He and Christina Nelson were married on February 10, 1887, a little more than five months before he was murdered. Tollefson was described as "a handsome fellow, and as brave and as generous as a man can be." The night that Tollefson was killed there was a big fire downtown and [...]
